Global Packaging Company Transforms SAP With Microsoft Azure
Faced with exiting its on-premises data center on a tight deadline, this global packaging company sought a more resilient, modernized hosting infrastructure for its SAP systems.
The organization rehosted its entire SAP landscape to the Microsoft Azure cloud in under four months.
Business Needs
The hyperscalability of the cloud brings new meaning to flexibility, elasticity and resilience — and it’s redefining how applications are architected and delivered. In addition, cloud technologies efficiently support customers as devices and data proliferate. And a pay-as-you-go model provides a fail-fast, agile platform for services development and provisioning. Because of these capabilities, many CIOs are adopting a new approach, reducing or eliminating their on-premises IT footprint and moving to the cloud.
The same is true for one of NTT DATA’s clients, a global packaging company serving the automotive, food and beverage, and home care industries. The company transformed its ERP systems, migrating and rehosting its entire SAP landscape from its on-premises data center to Microsoft Azure.
Outcomes
- Rehosts SAP to Microsoft Azure with a tight deadline and no unplanned business interruption
- Eliminates the business risk of maintaining critical ERP system in on-prem data center
- Takes full advantage of the benefits of Microsoft Azure
- Deploys a three-tier SAP architecture with clustering to offer high availability
- Achieves uptime of 99.95%
- Increases business agility and competitiveness
Solution
Legacy infrastructure creates risk
The company had been hosting its SAP solution in its on-premises data center with a configuration that provided no physical separation of the SAP application, its Microsoft SQL database and system controls. That configuration presented a single point of failure, making the system vulnerable to attacks and other unexpected operational interruptions.
As part of its IT strategy, the company elected to exit its on-premises data center and transform its SAP system with a cloud migration to mitigate risk and significantly improve agility and uptime.
Migration to the cloud
The company chose NTT DATA as its partner for the SAP cloud migration and rehosting services. Given only a four-month window before its data center exit, the company collaborated with NTT DATA, a platinum SAP partner with SAP on Microsoft Azure and the Windows Server and SQL Server Migration to Microsoft Azure Advanced Specializations.
The team rehosted the following systems on Microsoft Azure:
- 41 Windows virtual machines,19 of which host Microsoft SQL 2019
- 9 Linux virtual machines,5 of which host an SAP HANA database
Altogether, the team deployed 50 servers in the East US 2 region of the Azure environment. Operating systems for the implementation include:
- Windows Server 2008 through 2016 and 2019
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP 12 SP5
- Microsoft SQL Server 2019
The team built all servers from the ground up with a fresh install and data migration using two approaches, import/export and backup/restore for Java and non-Java systems.
Because SAP systems are essential to its business operations, the company ensured the cloud deployment was architected for high availability. To that end, the migration team designed and deployed a three-tier SAP architecture for critical systems, using clustering at each layer to offer high availability using Azure shared disks, availability sets, Azure backup and Azure monitor services. In addition, the team designed, implemented and migrated data, proving high availability by simulating various failure scenarios.
Despite the tight deadline and complex migration, the company experienced less than 12 hours of downtime, including post migration activities and system release.
Cloud transformation success
With its SAP landscape now fully deployed in Microsoft Azure, the high-availability system delivers an uptime of 99.95%. In addition, new features and capabilities streamline the handling and performance of SAP workloads and improve the integration into Azure for its use as a cloud platform.
The company’s leadership now has a clear view into how applications are connected and configured. And step-by-step procedures show how the systems are configured and how to remediate any issues that might arise.
Overall, the SAP cloud transformation has given the packaging company significantly higher business agility and increased competitiveness in the global marketplace.
About Global Packaging Company
Global packaging company migrates its business-critical SAP systems to Microsoft Azure, mitigating risk and boosting uptime to 99.95%.